


"A Streetcar Named Desire:" an exclusive interview with Stella DuBois

by Sparklespirit



Category: A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
Genre: Allan deserved better, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Author!AU, F/M, Gen, Genderswapped Mitch, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Script/Interview format, Stella is still single in this one, The Streetcar is put to good use, and Allan too, and mitch, but I promise this is mostly about Stella being happy, possible abuse of the Nine Inch Nails, thank you tag wranglers!, the format is what I, thinks a Vanity Fair interview looks like, we all roast Blanche, who has never read a Vanity Fair interview, who is now Michelle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2021-01-27 20:22:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21398107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sparklespirit/pseuds/Sparklespirit
Summary: Stella DuBois, renowned playwright, gives an interview.(Or: Allan lives, Stanley gets hit with the streetcar, and Vivien Leigh is confused.)
Relationships: Allan Grey (A Streetcar Named Desire)/Original Male Character, Blanche Dubois/Allan Grey
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6





	"A Streetcar Named Desire:" an exclusive interview with Stella DuBois

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to my friend Erin, who was so enthusiastic about this idea! She's awesome.

**“A Streetcar Named Desire- behind the scenes”**

**By Vivien Leigh**

_[Exclusive to Vanity Fair, one of the brilliant breakout playwrights behind this year’s sensational “A Streetcar Named Desire” has agreed to give an interview. Stella DuBois lives, not in a shabby apartment near the train tracks, but in a positively charming little apartment, festooned with books and potted plants and knickknacks, in the beautiful French Quarter. She beckons me to sit across from her, and hands me a mug of sweet tea before we begin.]_

**Leigh:** Hello, Miss DuBois.

**DuBois:** Oh, please, call me Stella.

_[She laughs gaily, tossing her green-and-blonde hair to the side. From the rainbow flag pinned to a jean jacket hung in the corner of the room, “gaily” is accurate in both meanings.]_

**Leigh:** As we know, “Tennessee Williams” is the pseudonym you and your co-creators chose to publish under. What was your inspiration for that? Why did you not all take credit for your work?

**DuBois:** The very fact that everyone knows who I am should show that it was never really intended to be a pseudonym. We used “Tennessee Williams” because three names don’t fit on book covers! _[she laughs again] _We used that name specifically because it’s distinctive and memorable, and Allan desperately wanted to name the character that ended up being Stanley “Tennessee William,” but Frank and I wouldn’t let him.

_[She smiles, softly, through gleaming and only slightly crooked teeth.]_

**Leigh:** Frank and Allan being your co-writers?

**DuBois:** Yes. They would have come here, too, and were quite excited, but they won a trip to the Caribbean for their anniversary and decided to go. They do send their regards, though.

**Leigh:** How did you meet them? A chance connection at a job, a botched date, serendipity? The story behind this type of creative team must be interesting.

_[Miss DuBois laughs again, but sharper. She seems to be less than pleased.] _

**DuBois:** It is an interesting story, though not as pleasant as one would expect.

**Leigh:** How so?

**DuBois:** _[dryly] _Striking up a friendship with your sister’s ex-fiancé is always a fraught endeavor.

**Leigh:** um…

**DuBois:** I had gone to what then was then my family’s country plantation, for the rehearsal of my sister’s wedding. Our relationship hadn’t been the best since I left for college, but there hadn’t been much family strife for years, and I was genuinely happy for her.

**Leigh:** So what happened?

**DuBois:** Apparently, in a stroke of dramatic genius or everyday stupidity, poor Allan neglected to mention to dear Blanche that he was bi until a few days before the wedding was set to occur.

_[Both she and I wince in sympathy.]_

**DuBois:** So! There was a shouting row, all the rest of the guests that hadn’t arrived yet were told not to come, and since I was the only one that had actually arrived that early I had to deal with a moping Allan and an irate Blanche and… it was not fun.

_[She seems unfocused, like she’s almost forgotten I’m in the room.]_

He begged her to tell him what the problem was, she’d start screaming, and it was generally not a fun experience to skulk around for several days. I ran into Allan a few times that week, and he seemed pretty nice, if making my sister upset. At this point I hadn’t heard what actually was going on, and was trying to stay out of the way.

_[She stands up abruptly and begins to pace.] _

Finally, when Allan had left in disgrace and terror, on the night they were supposed to be getting married, Blanche inevitably started venting. She drank, she yelled, she cried, and as the required audience to all this I finally pieced together what happened.

_[She seems to fully immerse herself in the memory, staring off into space dreamily.]_

He did love her, and she didn’t see that. She thought that because her darling had once loved another, he couldn’t really love her. I told her, he could have had anyone, anyone in the world and he chose you, why would he have anyone else if he had you, and she accused me of making excuses for him. She said that if he was struggling, he shouldn’t have gone to her, and after I told her that I knew what it was like to struggle, and it wasn’t like that, she….

_[She trails off.]_

_[She shakes herself suddenly, bringing herself back to this cozy room filled with light, instead of a dark old plantation house.]_

_[She smiles brightly and wipes her eyes. I do not comment. She then sits down in what must be her chair, across from me again.]_

Well, she said some things that I can’t forget or forgive, and I told her to get out of my house.

**Leigh:** Your house?

**DuBois:** Belle Reve was supposed to be hers, really, as she was the oldest child, but she made me swap. _[laughs bitterly]_ “She wanted to live in the city,” she said, and made me agree to swap the money I would have gotten from our parents’ will with her part: the plantation itself! Never mind that I wanted to live in the city, had always wanted an apartment in the French Quarter since I was a little girl, Blanche was in charge and pushy and always got her way. But not in my house.

_[A short silence. I don’t want to break it, but I do have to go back to the office soon.]_

**Leigh:** [tentatively] But Allan left that night… how’d you become friends after that?

**DuBois:** I had his number, because as I was in charge of Belle Reve, Blanche had taken the liberty of telling any and all guests to contact me with any logistical issues. She didn’t want to do it, but played her laziness off by saying “I haven’t lived here in years, darling, it simply must be you to answer, because I don’t know what you’ve done with the place.” She knew damn well I hadn’t done anything, because I didn’t want to be there and didn’t care. Before the whole fiasco happened, Allan had called me to ask if his family could stay on the property, because of course Blanche didn’t know, and I had his number.

After the whole blowup, he called me to ask if I knew where Blanche had gone. Apparently she had gone to their apartment when he was out one day, packed her bags, and left without so much as a note. I told him the truth, that I’d had a fight with her and told her to get out, and I hadn’t heard from her since. We agreed to share any information, if Blanche talked to either of us.

In the beginning, he’d check back every day. I felt horrible for him, because he was obviously heartbroken over the whole thing, so one day I asked him out to tea.

_[At the sight of my shocked face, she smiles.]_

Oh, not like that. Just to talk, and to talk about something that wasn’t my rotten sister. The chat went well, and we ended up just hanging out pretty often. He actually helped me find a good realtor, to sell Belle Reve. All my extended family was either estranged or dead, or possibly both, and the only real blood relative I had still was Blanche, who’d disappeared to parts unknown. I didn’t want the place: Blanche was the one that had illusions of Antebellum grandeur, and she didn’t really want to live there either. I’d looked into selling before, but held off, because Blanche was dead-set on getting married there, and she’d never have let me hear the end of it if I’d sold before her grand nuptials. I figured that she’d had her shot at getting married there, and I’d had enough of her dictating my life.

So, I sold the old land for a truly staggering sum to some Dallas oil millionaire, and moved to a tiny apartment next to the train tracks. I freely admit, it was a dump, but I wanted to live like a normal person for once in my life. Even at college, I’d had nice dorm rooms with no roommates, and designer clothes, and no friends at all. I wanted something not connected to my family’s money at all, and surrounded by as many people as possible.

_[She reaches over her shoulder, nearly tipping the chair in an effort to grasp a photo album from the shelf behind her. She makes the reach, barely, and dusts the cover off before handing the book to me.]_

_[She seems to be lost in the memories as she dreamily relates the stories behind the images.]_

I had these horribly loud neighbors upstairs, named Steve and Eunice. Terrible people, always having screaming fights and playing their music too loudly. I had taken a job waitressing during the day, and keeping score at a bowling alley at night, neither of which pay especially well, so I needed a roommate. I advertised, and found a seemingly neat, nice person to share my small suite of four rooms: two tiny bedrooms that could have been remodeled closets, a bathroom that only intermittently had hot water, and an unholy abomination of a kitchen/sitting room that hadn’t been remodeled since at least the sixties. My roommate was Frank, by the way. The trains were loud, the wallpaper was an assault to the eyes, and it took both me and Frank long enough to learn to cook properly that all the takeout places nearby knew us on sight. It was bliss.

_[We flip through the album, with her pointing out the people and places in the photos: _

_a shabby old building with a faded sign proclaiming “Elysian Fields” on it_

_a bowling alley that could probably stick you to the floor with all the drinks that had been dropped there _

_Miss DuBois herself, in a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt, playing cards with a squirrely-looking young man- “that’s Frank, we always told him he looked like a middle schooler, and he’d say that ‘I’m not short, I’m fun size, and you two are no fun at all’”_

_Allan and she grinning loopily, with Kool-aid dyed hair- “It was terrible and we couldn’t get it out for ages”_

_She and another woman, “that’s Michelle,” arm wrestling, cheered on by an obviously terrified Allan]_

Of course, Allan kept coming over, as we were quite good friends at this point, and one thing led to another, really. He and Frank started dating in earnest a few months after they met, and they got married this time last year.

_[She grins evilly.]_

I don’t know if Blanche changed her email or not. I know she changed her number, but in my petty little soul I hope she opened the attachment marked “wedding photos.”

I do hope she’s doing okay, but I’m not about to talk to her first. I haven’t changed my number since then, and it’s been three years now. If she wants to get in touch, she can call.

**Leigh:** That’s quite the story! I assume your falling-out with Blanche was one of the main inspirations behind “Streetcar?”

**DuBois:** It was certainly part of it.

**Leigh:** What were the other inspirations?

**DuBois:** Oh, we wrote it partly as a roast of Blanche, but also of society. It was right at the end of June, at a little party, with Allan and Frank and our friend Michelle and me, and we’d all gone to Pride together earlier that week. We all started talking about how it’s better now, for us, but it didn’t used to be, for us who are different.

_[At my quizzical look, she says:]_

Oh, I’m aro. Hence the green tips in my hair.

Anyway, we were all talking about what it could have been like if we’d all met in the 1940’s, and I said that sounded like a story. We started throwing around ideas, just for kicks, and Allan said, “wow, we should write this.” So I grabbed some paper and an orange marker and wrote the first notes for what would become “Streetcar” that night. Michelle could have written it with us, but she decided not to. She’s not much of a writer, really, and running her own car repair shop takes a lot of time and energy. We put her in the story anyway, though.

**Leigh:** The only character in “Streetcar” that is canonically queer is Allan. Were the other characters supposed to be as well? And what happened to Frank?

**DuBois:** Well, yes. But we decided to not explicitly state the queerness of many of the characters, because for many of them, the language of the time just didn’t describe their experiences, and it’s highly likely that without the language and visibility the community has now, the characters wouldn’t know their own identities. However, those identities, as well as their social and economic predicaments, do shape their decisions.

**Leigh:** But what happened to Frank?

**DuBois:** He was intended to be the “older friend” of the character Allan, but stating his name never worked for the flow of the scene.

**Leigh:** You haven’t said anything about Michelle. Is she anything like her character?

**DuBois:** A bit. She’s both grey-romantic and grey-asexual, which influenced Mitch-the-character’s attitude toward romance, and ahe is generally the most thoughtful and calm of all of us, which does translate into her character. She’s slow to anger, more genteel than someone who didn’t know her would expect, and just a lovely person to be around. She has a bit of a Rosie-the-riveter aesthetic, but I don’t know how much that transferred! I think all of us transmitted a bit of our own selves to the characters, which is part of why they seem so real. In some part, they are. They’re not exactly replicas of us, but enough that we can see ourselves in them.

**Leigh:** Is Stanley Kowalski based on any real person? I hope not!

**DuBois:** Not intentionally. We had to find a source of tension more than “there are a bunch of people in a house, that’s it, that’s the plot,” and an exploration of an abusive relationship in the 1940’s was the thing we settled on, along with the obligatory roast of Blanche. How_ever,_ the first name that I blurted out when we were trying to name “the crazy husband” was “Stanley Kowalski,” and after we ended up going with that, I remembered why I thought of that name immediately.

It was when I was still waitressing (I don’t do it anymore, after “Streetcar” went big I pretty much abandoned my jobs to do tours and help with the upcoming production, and I moved out of Elysian Fields at about the same time, because Allan and Frank moved in together then), and I was a little concerned, because a drunk creeper was trying to follow me home. I had to take the streetcar, which actually is named Desire, back to Elysian Fields, and I’d just made it on time- which I noticed when I was crossing the street and the streetcar was barreling right towards me! I briefly froze, then threw myself forward and out of the tracks. Unfortunately for him, the creeper following me home hadn’t seen the streetcar until it was too late.

I felt horrible, of course, as if it was somehow my fault. I went to Stanley Kowalski’s funeral, one of a very few that did, and planned to bring flowers to put on his grave. But after the service, his girlfriend, who showed up out of a sense of tragic duty or something, I don’t know what, told me that she’d been trying to leave him for years, that he’d made it unsafe to, and I gave the flowers to her instead “as a new-life-warming gift.”

So that is the origin of Stanley Kowalski.

**Leigh:** Not what one would expect.

**DuBois:** My life rarely is.

_[She stands to replace the photo album reverently on its shelf. She stands momentarily silhouetted against the light, a woman of light and shadow. I do not want to leave her sun-drenched, plant-filled home, but I have to.]_

**DuBois:** Thank you for coming. I do have one request, however.

**Leigh:** What is it?

**DuBois:** Publish this interview exactly as it was. No “editing for clarity” or anything. Publish your notes. I want people to know the story of “Streetcar” in all its faults and coincidences.

_[I leave her apartment after shaking her hand and step out into the sunny street. Miss DuBois seems like a lovely lady, who would be a wonderful friend. As I walk towards the streetcar that will carry me back to my office, I feel something crumple in my jacket pocket. I gingerly pull out and unfold a note. On heavy cream-colored paper, in brilliant purple ink, a string of scrawled digits and a smiley face are neatly written above the quote: “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” I carefully fold it back up and walk on, with a smile in my step.]_

_[In accordance with Miss DuBois’ wishes, the transcript of the interview has been reprinted here verbatim.]_

_[As per the playwrights’ stipulations, 10% of the proceeds from playscripts, merchandise, and tickets to “A Streetcar Named Desire” go to organizations that support survivors of domestic abuse.]_

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are always welcome! Also feel free to ask me anything about this au or Streetcar in general! 
> 
> Because I'm extra, I made playlists!
> 
> General:  
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1wXavJgtWnru961ASfMGCq?si=6rHnfCWvSUWgqP8Jpr-V2A
> 
> For Blanche:  
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7vyzKO391GGXO4CggGD4Pn?si=Y2hlkd7WTH682cMtaHxJxA
> 
> For Stella:  
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0uxAxjqP4Z2eR3rp1Wx6yv?si=_cExf27zRZK92KCwpQde3A


End file.
